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Friday, October 26, 2012

Halloween Bottles

We're having a lazy Friday night of some drinks on the couch while watching a Walking Dead marathon on Netflix. Watching all those zombies got me inspired to make some quick, easy, & practically free creepy bottles to use for Halloween decor - using these great labels from the Ellinée blog.

I first got the idea to do this when I saw these bottles at World Market. I really liked them, but I'm way too cheap to pay $30 for empty bottles - and they looked so simple to make (minus the snazzy colors and stoppers, of course). I actually started making my own labels but then got sidetracked and never finished - and when I stumbled across the free printable labels from Ellinée today through the Creativity Exchange's post on favorite Halloween ideas, I decided to just use those instead since I liked them more than the ones I had started!

Scissors & glue (if you printed on regular paper rather than label paper)

Corks or other stoppers (optional)

Twine (optional)

Cost: Basically free!

The first (and worst) step of the process is to get the old labels off your bottles. I started by soaking mine in very hot soapy water for about ten minutes...

This method worked like magic for the beer bottles. I was all excited and did a little happy dance for my new found trick. But I danced too soon - for my other bottles, especially the wine bottle, the labels were a lot trickier to remove. Those took some scraping and I ended up busting out the Goo Gone. Once you give your bottles a good rinsing and dry them off.

Next, cut out your labels. These were designed for wine bottles and will fit those perfectly. For my smaller bottles, I just cut the borders off rather than resizing, although I do think they look nicer with the full label.

Then glue on your labels. I used an Elmer's glue stick (don't judge - I couldn't find anything around the house that would work better!).

For the stoppers, I put a full cork in the wine bottle (duh), cut one in half for the two beer bottles, and cut out a small piece of cork for the skinny hot sauce bottle opening. I had some twine lying around and decided to wrap up the top of one of the beer bottles to make it look a little different than the other. Then I decided to wrap the clear one up a bit too to make it look a little more interesting.

Here are a couple of pics of the final product. I like them even better in the candlelight

Thanks so much to Ellinée for designing and sharing these labels! And to Cyndy at the Creativity Exchange for highlighting the labels in her Friday Favorites!